EVENTS

Maryam speaks

Hiding behind ‘rights’ and ‘choice’ to excuse misogyny is a betrayal of human principles. After all, years ago, certain men only had the ‘right’ to vote and own slaves.

Remember good old fashioned international solidarity – how I miss it – when we actually joined forces with those suffering under racial apartheid in South Africa for example.

Nowadays, many liberals and post-modernist leftists side with those imposing apartheid – sex apartheid – because it is considered the ‘right to religion’…

It’s a betrayal of human solidarity.

And this solidarity is fundamental particularly given that Islamism and Sharia law have killed a generation in what I call an Islamic inquisition. There is a difference after all between Christianity today and one during the inquisition.

Under an inquisition, there is no personal religion. You are merely told what to say and do and if you don’t abide you will pay the price for your dissent.

And then there’s Islamophobia. I keep telling people – it’s not just me…

When the Saudi government arrests 23 year old Hamza Kashgari for tweeting about Mohammad, it doesn’t accuse him of racism, it accuses him of blasphemy – an accusation punishable by death.

But that same government will accuse critics of Saudi policy at the UN Human Rights Committee as Islamophobic and racist.

What I’m trying to say is that Islamists and their apologists have coined the term Islamophobia – a political term – to scaremonger people into silence.

These bogus accusations of Islamophobia and offence serve Islamism in the same way that Sharia law serves them where they have power. It helps to threaten, intimidate and silence criticism, solidarity and dissent.

They work like secular fatwas and are used not to defend Muslims from bigotry but to defend Islam and Islamism.

Comments

I really like Maryam’s stuff, but unfortunately, my computer will not let me read her without crashing (guess it’s been infested by the anti-Islamaphobes?). Keep posting it here, Ophelia, and those of us who can’t get onto her column can enjoy at least bits and pieces of her thoughts!

When the Saudi government arrests 23 year old Hamza Kashgari for tweeting about Mohammad, it doesn’t accuse him of racism, it accuses him of blasphemy – an accusation punishable by death.

But that same government will accuse critics of Saudi policy at the UN Human Rights Committee as Islamophobic and racist.

Discussion of Islamophobia misses an important perspective – the attitudes of Muslims towards non-Muslims. The people who published the Mohammed cartoons were not Muslims, and so not bound by the taboo. And perhaps only tens of people were involved in the decision to publish the cartoons. Yet many Muslims reacted destructively against targets that were obviously nothing to do with those people.

This suggests that there is a frequent attitude by Muslims towards non-Muslims that needs to be explained. It can’t be dismissed simply as a reaction to Islamophobia – it is an attitude revealed when non-Muslims don’t conform to Muslim standards.

The Runnymede Trust published a “diagnostic” of Islamophobia in 1997. It is somewhat shoddy, but at least attempts to be systematic. I’ve reversed it to become a diagnostic for “Infidelophobia” or “Westophobia”. It is fascinating to see how often rhetoric from Islamic sources has the Islam-centric equivalent characteristics of Islamophobia, mutatis mutandis.

There is a lot of hypocrisy around, often unthinking and perhaps unconscious.

Ask yourself two questions
1. How do I feel about Fred Phelps/Westboro Baptist?
2. How do I feel about (Islamist du jour) and Islam?

I am definitely Phelpsophobic and thus Westborophobic. These seem to be reasonable reactions to morally, rationally, politically disgusting attitudes and behaviors.

Isn’t ‘Islamophobia’ therefore a reasonable position? Many Muslims are morally functioning human beings, with whom I feel full human solidarity. So too, there are members of the Phelps family who are morally functioning human beings etc. In both cases this moral health depends upon how far they have escaped the world of Phelps and Muhammad.